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Diebold Election Results Released By AZ Judge
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri Dec 21, 2007 09:33 AM
from the just-a-little-more-oversight dept.
from the just-a-little-more-oversight dept.
Windrip writes "A judge in the case covering the nature of the database used in Diebold Gems software during Pima County, Arizona elections has ruled the DB is not a computer program (pdf). The result is that the Arizona Democratic party will have the chance to review previous elections for transparency and accuracy. ''The Pima County Democratic Party sued the county this year for the electronic databases from past elections. The party requested the databases and passwords be released according to Arizona public-records law. Pima County denied that part of the request, while turning over other records the party asked for. In closing arguments of the four-day trial that began Dec. 4, Pima County argued the databases meet the definition of a computer program, which is protected by state law, said Deputy County Attorney Thomas Denker."
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[+]
Politics: Open Source Voting Software Success 73 comments
elhaf writes "The Open Voting Consortium has announced that they successfully demonstrated the Open Voting Process in San Luis Obispo this weekend. OVC received a request from San Luis Obispo County on the previous Monday to provide software to run their January 12 straw poll. By Friday, they had the software prepared and Saturday's event goes down as a great success for Open Voting Consortium and the cause of transparent election administration. They used Ubuntu and their code is publicly available. Surprisingly, counting ballots is not rocket science."
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Good. (Score:2)
Re:Good. (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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Or maybe the judge is one of the rare of his/her breed which actually suffers from an ailment which seems to disqualify most from their profession -- common sense?
Re:Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Then it would be defective by design (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do I in any case guess that this database is either MSDE or SQL Express?
Parent
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I thought Diebold used Access.
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Access confirmed in the court ruling (Score:5, Informative)
The arguments about an Access database being a "program" are probably related to the ability of MDB to contain queries (aka stored procedures).
GBF files are encrypted / compressed MDB files. The dockit claims that "a gbf file can only be created and opened by the GEMS program", but I suspect it unpacks them to a temporary file somewhere before it opens them up with the normal library.
Other little GEMS (sorry, couldn't resist the pun)...
* "Microsoft has warned against using the mdb format for some critical applications, such as election management software."
* Each expert witness endorsed a statement that the GEMS software has significant security flaws.
Parent
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Too bad Microsoft can't realise that! Of course, it's hard to impliment Dumb Restrictions on Music (DRM) without making your data file format (wma) also be a program. I can't understand why a plain word processing document should be a program though.
I'm surprised that they haven't come up with a photo file that your can write a virus in.
Data should be data and code should be code. The judge gets it, but unfortunately way too many compu
Hey now! (Score:4, Funny)
Not again! (Score:3, Insightful)
Concentrate on solving the problems not trying to figure out some loop hole or proving some conspiracy and blaming others for not doing well at the polls.
I really wish there was a third party candidate that had a shot at winning.
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Why does the Elections Office want to protect the data so much? Either they are protecting their own negligence or wrong doing. Either way, neither of those have a place in elections.
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Because of people like you, You can call everything a conspiracy theory and denounce it as crazy, but I'd rather have checks in place to make sure anyway.
There isn't any reason to go crying over spilled milk, but at the same time we should be working to make sure it won't spill again. This is one of the ways to make sure our next election is fair.
Take the 2004 election (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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Re:Not again! (Score:4, Insightful)
Accountability is important. There is not nearly enough of it in the American government, at any level.
Parent
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Accountability is important. But after all these recounts and investigations there has not been anyone charged with voter fraud, just accusations and innuendo.
Politicians have been breed to win elections, not to solve the problems
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the data can be evaluated and stats worked up.
If someone was fooling with the vote count they would have to be very careful
in how they entered the data. Stats can be run one the distribution pattern and
non-random sequence of entries can be looked at closely.
Hell - every election voting database should be accessable on the net for any
election, so that ANYONE can run the numbers and take a look. look what happened
2004 election - someone w
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It's tricky to make the data public. We are trying to balance between a secret ballot and voting fraud. Database analysis makes it increasingly easy to tell exactly how people voted (esp in smaller districts) which puts people under pressure.
I do not think it is a powerful conservative group. It is a powerful wealthy and corporate group. The conservative is just a sha
/. exclusive - the DB schema (Score:2, Funny)
democrat_vote_total TINYINT,
republican_vote_total BIGINT
);
Re:/. exclusive - the DB schema (Score:4, Funny)
third_party_total BOOLEAN
Parent
Whoa! (Score:2)
A judge who knows the difference between a database and a program. Now, if I can find a heterosexual masseur, I've seen anything I thought could not exist.
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I have two of them in my immediate family, fwiw. Glad I could help.
Cheers,
Nathan
A simple remark (Score:5, Insightful)
From The Article (not the PDF) (Score:4, Insightful)
I pretty much think that this is the point; and it is an important point, because without the ability to call "bullshit" then you lose the legitimacy of the votes. Any corporation wouldn't trust an accountant to maintain the books without auditing them periodically, this is basically the same thing.
also, the systems can already be hacked (quite easily I believe)
Programs, Data, fuzzy distinctions (Score:5, Interesting)
But the database program is just data to be interpreted by the CPU.
Data vs. document is a spectrum. There is no clear distinction. We tend to think of documents as just information, describing some structured knowledge, which is true. But by contrast, we tend to think of programs as containing primarily step-by-step instructions. But those instructions don't execute themselves. They're input to something. And moreover, not all programs are instructions. Consider Prolog, where the functions are described in terms of logical relationships, and the step-by-step instructions are inferred by the interpreter. Just because the Prolog program doesn't include instructions, per se, doesn't make us say it's not a program. At the same time, the distinction between a Prolog program and an expert system knowledge base (in term of form and function) is not clear.
Everything is just data. What makes it meaningful is the order and interpretation that we impose on it.
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The principle difference, though, is that code is functional while data is expressive. You can argue that this is a f
Re:Programs, Data, fuzzy distinctions (Score:4, Informative)
Actually, you're referring to Von Neumann architecture. The other architecture is Harvard. Harvard has separate code and data memory (mostly - you still get the convenience of immediate mode addressing in Harvard). But code can only work on data memory - it cannot work on code memory. However, it's only really useful for speciailized computers running the same code on different data (e.g., signal processing - the data is transformed the same way all the time, so the code can reside in ROM, while the data comes in from whatever source is providing it).
The Von Neumann architecture (code and data are intermingled, and one and the same) is your standard computer architecture. However, the behavior is used very often. Think every time you call exec() or CreateProcess() - the OS has to allocate memory, copy the code to memory (i.e., to the OS, your executable program is data), then tell the processor to run the code (now the data is code). Or even consider the bootstrap program - it has to find the OS loader program, which it copies off some storage to memory (data), then runs it (code). It's this architecture that makes modern computing possible...
Parent
Just base metal or dried pigment until viewed (Score:4, Insightful)
How very Hinduistically existential of you, actually. Quoting from a recent Natl. Geo. article, Faces of the Divine in the January 2008 issue (which I received earlier this week, thanks apparently to time-traveling magazine editors):
So I suppose what you describe would be the CPU's darshan of the code. (Though one could probably make a reasonable argument about which is data and which the program on the basis of specifically how dynamic the darshan needs to be to make sense of it.)
I find it somehow reassuring, and deeply cool, that certain wisdoms of the ancients can be perfectly relevant in wildly different contexts. It's also humbling to find how much our supposedly "primitive" ancestors got right in areas that we have forgotten or set aside. :)
Cheers,
Parent
Security by obscurity? (Score:5, Insightful)
The craptaculous /. edit (Score:3, Interesting)
Those of you truly interested in this story should read the firehose version [slashdot.org].
I think the links in the firehose version of the story are more apropos to this post's tags.
Of particular concern to me is the replacement of one the original post's links with one that references a newspaper I consider to be a parody of press oversight. I would never source that bloated, piss-stained, corporate catamite in any post I write.
So, when /. writes "Windrip writes", they're lying. I didn't write what was posted on the front page of /. I didn't even provide one of the links in the story.
Nevertheless, of particular interest to /. readers might be the forensic study conducted on the DB. I found it here. [azag.gov]
While they're at it .... (Score:4, Funny)
What happens when we find out Al Gore won? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Yes, don't you love how those scheming, conniving Republicans, who had only to push around a few bits to tweak the results, manipulated the elections to throw both houses of Congress to the Democrats last year? What a brilliant way to throw people off the scent! Now if they can just get Hillary in the White House, their diabolical strangle hold on power will be all but unbreakable! MUHAHAHA
Re:DIebold Defeats Democracy (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
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Prime example: Imagine the world today with a President Bush vs. a President Gore or President Kerry.
Both parties may share some of the same social diseases, and the fringe reactionary kooks of both parties are still reactionary kooks, but A==B? No way.
Re:DIebold Defeats Democracy (Score:4, Insightful)
Close races are close races.. can go either way.. that's when manipulation is useful... If there is no doubt that someone was going to win, and they didn't, manipulation would be kind of noticeable wouldn't it ?
Parent
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Re:DIebold Defeats Democracy (Score:4, Informative)
Diebold is the corporation's choice for subverting democracy.
Imagine a world where people vote, but the votes don't matter because the corporations have bribed both wings of the single party in this plutocracy. They just sit in a machine controlled by puppets of the Corporation. We are living this dream.
Parent
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The fact that Diebold's central tabulator used Microsoft Access [equalccw.com]?
(Reported in several stories, notably a DVD called "Invisible Ballots")
That their hardware [blackboxvoting.org] is some of the most programmer-friendly ever (straight X86 CPU, SDcard, CompactFlash sockets)?
(This is a simplified, smaller version of a larger report. A quick Google search will reveal more.)
WindowsCE OS?
(Same report as above)
Executable Scripts on the ballot-definition CF cards?
(Demonstrated in "Invisible Bal
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
In a word, yes.
I am very active in the central Ohio voting reform movement, and it is important to distinguish between statements I believe to be true versus statements that are demonstrably true. It's too easy to fall into a variety of traps and this work is far too important to lose credibility due to hyperbolic speech.
There is also the legal thre
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What? I keed, I keed...